


Sirens In A Ghost City

by lalalive



Series: Time Runner [2]
Category: Muse (Band)
Genre: Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Science Fiction, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-04-02 05:50:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4048588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalalive/pseuds/lalalive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A prequel/sequel to Time Runner. In the months leading up to Matt's execution, he finds himself writing letters in a journal to Dominic as a way to cope with time and loss. Mostly, he writes so Dominic will know he never meant to be silent, he never meant to be hardened, all he ever meant to do was love him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sirens In A Ghost City

**22 December, 3416  
Area 26, Pod 5  
Soyeisa, Neo-Britannia, Post-Escos**

I remember when Christmas tasted like cinnamon. I remember a crisp December and your warm hands. I remember hot mulled wine and fingers dried from wrapping paper; tape making my fingerprints feel cracked. But it’s the cinnamon that stands out. The centuries of my life, of this life, are dulled by the way the powder lingered on your lips, on the leaves, in my blood too long past the season. Fuck the dinners. Fuck the presents. Your hot mouth burning with the flavor was always my Christmas wish. 

Today, Christmas tastes like ash. It’s your wet eyes and my slow realization that this is my last year with you. I haven’t said the words, haven’t really told you because I can’t, but I think you already know. When I look at you, you smile like I’m already gone; part of me is glad you almost seem used to the idea. The truth is that, soon, you’ll find me young and I’ll find a bullet to the head.

It’s hard to say what’s come over me, why I’m suddenly overwhelmed with an urge to document...what? Our endless and numbered days? Holidays? Moments in between? When I stop to think on it, chewing my cheek to raw iron from the fear of it, it comes down to the memory. That’s what all of this was, wasn’t it? Time is memory, we are a memory. We’ve become time and space and the fragments within and without. Writing this, writing the way you move when you think I’m not looking, the way I’m tethered to this reality when you touch me, reminds me that we were a fixed point. Immoveable. It means that when I’m gone you can remember too, using this as a bible of reassurance; when I’m gone I can say _death has worn my skin like armor but not once did we grieve._

**8 February, 3417**

Today, by all accounts, is meaningless. This is a day you will forget. It will slip, crawling on hands and knees, to the recesses of your mind where it will become molded under the weight of other, more important, more colourful moments, to become nothing more than a summation of _I was with him that day and we were happy._ We ran to days like these, days that seemed otherwise empty in summary but held, across a whole geography, a separate microcosm of individual events we would never touch. Birthdays, weddings, deaths, illnesses, whispered _I forgive you’s_ and shouted _how could you’s_ ; things that were never ours but happened just the same.

In our world, on this morning, you turned gracefully in bed, with your hand sliding a path down my arm to loop your fingers in the spaces between mine. In the wake of your movement, my knuckles took the deluge of your slow caress and I felt the whole of the cosmos rip through me. In that moment, I loved you with arms wide enough to hold the universe, with a heart like the cradle of creation - a cauldron of interstellar waste making nothing but a love for you. 

I rolled over, and you, still asleep, parted your lips as if waiting for me to kiss you hard enough to bruise. Instead I ran my fingers over your soft cheek, down to the silk of your hip and licked tenderly at your neck. 

I will never have my fill of you, your noise, and your silence. I will drink what I can until I am brimming over with it, until it drips from the open pores of my skin and leaves smears over yours. This is what and how I will give back to you, nothing but you and us, endless and the same, our own resolute system of desire. 

**10 March, 3417**

You held the key in your hands this evening, tight and secure as though it were our child and I laughed. I laughed as you looked at me, worried and confused, I laughed even when you left the room at my non-answer. Because how could I tell you the thing you cherish and regard with such awe, the mystery you wish to luxuriate in, is the source of all this destruction and chaos - is the pin that pulls the threads of every reality, every history, every life we could have built together? 

I have stopped myself countless times over the last few weeks from telling you to leave it, to forget it. I’ve never wanted to shout at you more to leave it - I am angrier, more bitter than in the cavern of loneliness that shrouded me throughout the Inquisition. I am more frightened, more anguished than in a department store on New Year’s Eve. This is my moment to tell you to end it. This is my opportunity to convince you, because I could. From the moment we met, the second time, with your wide eyes and bright, unchanged future, you have followed me and trusted me blindly. I wouldn’t even need to try, just five words - _please, just leave it be_ \- would find you leaving all of this behind.

But we’ve interfered with history before, and every choice we thought we made, every action we thought belonged to us, pulled the Earth apart and I am, as loathe I am to admit it, more afraid of an uncharted history than the one in which we die, scared and alone, in a world we broke with our bare hands. 

**15 April 3417**

We fought today, a thing we were always so good at doing. But the truth is that it was you who did the shouting, who’s frustration rose like bile until it came out like venom. You wanted me to scream with you, wanted me to pull out my verbal gun from its dusted holster.

‘This isn’t like you,’ you shouted. My god, you were glowing from the rage of it. ‘You always put me in my place, have a reason, an answer. Why are you silent? What aren’t you telling me?’ That was the most painful part, for you and for me. You knew I was keeping something from you, not lying but it felt just as cruel. I knew every detail of our wasted life - not wasted, transient and ephemeral - and could tell you nothing. You would know. You would know only in the hands of death. 

So I told you what I could, because when have I ever been able to refuse you anything? If you asked, I gave, and that was how I spent my days. Ceaselessly giving because you never ran me dry, and I was always filled with you. 

‘I feel like this thing...is an omen. And one day, it will cause us trouble.’

‘I won’t steal it, Matt, could you imagine the consequences? I’m just curious.’

Those were your words, not mine. And you told me then how hurt you were, how upset you were, that I stood by you all these years and supported your work but now, now when you’ve finally found something meaningful, I am pulling away from you.

I want to tell you that this is not what pulling away feels like. This is running full speed ahead towards an event horizon, and nothing, not even our free will, can keep us together. 

**20 May 3417**

I need you to know where and when and how I am writing this. It’s just after midnight, you are naked and sweat soaked in our bed, and I am sitting, with a raw arse and shaking hands, in our kitchen praying for all our nights and all our days to be spent like this. This, in all the time I have left, is all I will ever need to consider my life a whole one.

I hope that tonight I kissed you hard enough to feel me. I felt you, I always feel you, quaking within me like your seams are coming undone, as though you are burning alive and just can’t, for another moment, contain the star growing at the edge of your soul. I feel you in me long after you pull out, throughout the night and into the day, the residue of you stretching through me as if manipulating my DNA. I feel you in me when you haven’t been there at all.

I hope that tonight I held you hard enough to forget me. That I gripped your hips so tightly my fingerprints are etched onto your bone, a marker that you are mine and I am yours and my yearning is manifest for all to witness. That I gripped you so tight you will feel a desperate ache wherever I am not and that it hurts - I want this loss to hurt. 

I hope that I loved you deep enough, hard enough, that you are choking on it. I want you to feel like you are dissipating beneath the weight of it, compressed until you feel boneless, formless, and utterly lost in the truth of it. While you are sleeping tonight, I hope your heart becomes resolute in the knowledge that this love was ours, and that my hard edges were only soft because you loved away the shards.

I need these things because this is how I will always feel. And I will feel you long after I am gone, and I felt you long before you came.

Long after the last of my blood is drained from my body, leaking slowly through a bullet hole, all that will remain within me will be the traces, marks, and remains of you. 

**9 June 3417**

Today is my birthday. I’ve forgotten how old I am but we call it forty-eight...I call it forty-eight just for you. Time is meaningless. Time stopped mattering the second you held my face in your hands. We were surrounded by books and I thought ‘I will follow him, I will trust him, I will go wherever he leads.’ I never entertained ‘whenever he leads.’ Once I got used to the idea, chronology stopped holding any vague sort of importance. The only thing that mattered was you.

The only thing that will ever matter is you.

**6 July 3417**

You’re mad with knowledge today, embarking on an endless tirade of ‘how could we not have known,’ and ‘this is the only useful project I will ever work on.’ You have learned what the key does, you’ve learned what it did. There’s something furious on your features but it isn’t outrage, it isn’t terror, it’s hope. 

This is the moment I start to see us running. The wheels of your mind are turning and formulating a plan that makes you think you can save everything. Part of me, I think, always knew this is why I fell in love with you, why I am so helpless in the wake of you because you always run, headfirst and without question, towards what you believe is right. I wish I knew how to tell you that I never wanted you to be the world’s hero, only needed you for myself. I wish I knew how to tell you that nothing good will come of this, that we are the reason the world ends.

I won’t though.

This is the moment I remember you, caged and broken, speaking in tongues the way I speak to you now, telling me you were always so selfish. I want to tell you that I am the selfish one. Right here, right now, I can stop every inch of destruction that ever burned between us.

I won’t though.

_I love you too much to never love you at all._

**4 August 3417**

Today we are planning to hide and I am starting to realize this is the end. You’re frantic, trying to pack up the right things, the necessary things, and you are so willing to leave behind the things that us us that I start to see you as I met you. Now you are my soldier, now you are my past. 

Today, I am 22 years old, I am young, on the precipice of my life, and I am looking at you as though I am looking at God. We are in Paris, France, we are in my university library in the heart of London. We are in places I forgot existed, in a time that no longer feels like home because we live in the salt and dirt of history. My dissertation remains unfinished on a poorly varnished table. Your chest is heaving from exhaustion. My body is wracked with wonder and now I understand nostalgia really only makes sense if you never get to go home. I’m trying to find it in me to panic, because I know what this time means, but I know what the past means too. I am never fully without a home. 

In death, I will live and thus so will you.

**14 September 3417**

Tomorrow I am going to die. I have been served a court order to appear before the Mer Delta Admin offices and I know. Geographically speaking, it is the place. Temporally speaking, it is the time. Emotionally speaking...it seems impossible to fathom. This morning you held my face in your hands and begged me not go. 

‘We can leave before dawn, they won’t find us.’

I wanted to tell you they would. Maybe not now, maybe not in the next year - I stop myself from saying they find you in 2067, just before we’ve ended the world. In 2067 they take you back home, they drag you here, and try you for a crime you never thought you’d commit...never meant to commit. 

Instead, I hold you to me, I kiss you on the mouth - tongue first because I need to swallow this moment whole - and tell you I love you. I let you fuck me slowly, until I’m crying and begging you never to stop because shuddering beneath this softness, this gentleness, is the only time I feel like myself.

Today I am 22 and I am in love. Today I am 22 and holding you for the first time.

Tomorrow I am going to die. Tomorrow, you will find these pages and come looking for me. Tomorrow, you will watch me die and start to run. These pages will be bound into a book you keep at your hip next to your gun. In 2054, I will catch you reading them and you will pull away from me and say _‘everything in its own time.’_

You will run for four months before you think to run through time.

You will run to me.

I will be waiting and I will follow. 

I will never go anywhere without you. 

_Not without you. Never without you._


End file.
